Plans Project plans and planning are inevitably a part of any project initiative. In almost all enterprise environments projects are next to impossible to initiate and to execute without a plan. By “plan” I mean any...

Since I put down my thoughts on Principle-based Project Management and the Project Action Principles some time back, I’ve been thinking and researching endlessly about the interplay between linear and non-linear cognition in the practice of Project Management, and how this interacts with our project context.

If you’re a startup, then your organisation is the team. If you’re in a larger enterprise, your team can start small: maybe even just with you! but if you are even modestly successful, you’re going to have to grow the team. In fact, beyond the craziness of early stage startups, mostly you have to grow the team in order to be successful. But as you grow, you run the risk of getting too large. How large is too large?

Scrum and Agile Guru Mike Cohn wrote in his weekly Agile Tips email that we should mark the moment to focus on what our teams have achieved. Triggered by the bigtime Thanksgiving celebration in the USofA, Mike wrote how we often...

Suddenly you need to accelerate the delivery of your project! You no longer have until, say, 15th May, you now need to deliver by the end of April. Or maybe the middle of April!! So now you have to think about if, and how, your project can be accelerated. So, what can you do? How do you determine viability of acceleration, without ending up in a nett loss of momentum or progress, even if the acceleration process doesn’t materialize? Over the next few posts I will look at the key aspects of this question, and provide recommendations on how this can be approached.

Projects fail because we make them fail. Until we start thinking in these terms, we’re likely to continue to make them fail, because we downplay the well established causes of failure, and ignore the most obvious and well known contributors of success.

“What is the most important skill that a Project Manager needs to be successful?” This question is asked endlessly in articles, blog posts, discussion groups and polls. The usual answers are skills such as: “Leadership”,...